Presented by MNT-Halan

For decades, access to finance in Egypt depended on one thing. Did a person already have a banking relationship and a paper trail to prove it. That standard shut out many people who could repay a loan responsibly but had never built the credit history lenders required to see it.

Why You Should Care

Egypt has made real progress on financial access. The Central Bank of Egypt reports that 77.6% of Egyptian adults held a formal financial account by the end of 2025, a sharp rise from a decade ago. But an account is not the same as active use. The real test of inclusion is whether people can actually borrow, save, pay, and invest through the formal system, not simply open a door to it.

That gap matters to anyone tracking Egypt’s economy. Millions of creditworthy borrowers, from first-time earners to small business owners, still sit outside formal lending because they lack the paperwork banks have traditionally required. Closing that gap unlocks capital for exactly the people and businesses that drive job creation and consumption.

Traditional underwriting relies on financial statements, banking history, and prior loans. Those tools work well for customers who already have a financial footprint. They tell lenders very little about someone who has never borrowed but pays their bills on time and manages money responsibly. In a market where large numbers of people and small businesses are entering the formal system for the first time, that gap in the model is exactly where new tools are starting to make a difference.

The Ripple

Artificial intelligence and alternative data are changing what counts as evidence of creditworthiness. Instead of relying only on a credit file, lenders can now read a wider set of signals, including how someone spends, how consistently they pay, and how they use financial products day to day. Used well, this does not replace traditional risk management. It adds a second lens to it, letting institutions extend credit responsibly to people conventional scoring would have missed entirely.

MNT-Halan is one of the clearest examples of this shift at work in Egypt. Through the Halan app, customers access consumer finance, make digital payments, shop online, and invest, all on a single platform. Every interaction generates data, from purchasing behavior and repayment patterns to how customers move between financial products. Together, these signals build a fuller picture of financial behavior than a credit history alone ever could.

Consider a customer who has never taken out a loan but regularly buys from a small retailer through the Halan app. That customer has no conventional credit record, but their transaction history and spending patterns still say something real about how they manage money. MNT-Halan’s proprietary scoring model reads those signals and, where the data supports it, approves a consumer finance limit. That is a pathway into the formal financial system that traditional underwriting alone would not have opened.

The scale of that shift is measurable. More than half of MNT-Halan’s financing decisions are now fully automated, and its scoring models have brought over 500,000 customers with no prior credit history into formal financing for the first time. Ahmed Mohsen, MNT-Halan’s Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer, wrote about the approach in a blog published with the World Economic Forum, describing how AI-powered credit scoring can improve approval rates and extend credit to people conventional systems had overlooked. Lending decisions that once took days now take minutes, and MNT-Halan maintains that this speed has not come at the expense of the risk standards that protect both lender and borrower.

This matters beyond one company’s balance sheet. When a lending model can responsibly say yes to a first-time borrower, it does more than approve a loan. It brings that person into a financial system where their future repayment history can start working for them, opening the door to better terms and more products over time.

What to Watch

None of this works without trust. As AI-based scoring spreads across Egypt’s financial sector, the institutions that succeed will be the ones that pair the technology with transparency, fair treatment of customers, and real human oversight, not automation for its own sake.

The next phase of financial inclusion in Egypt will look different from the last one. Opening accounts got the country this far. Widening access to credit, savings, and investment products for people already inside the system is what comes next, and it depends on lenders building models that are both accurate and accountable to regulators and customers alike.

For companies like MNT-Halan, the opportunity is to prove that faster and more automated lending can also be more inclusive lending. If the sector gets the balance right between innovation and responsible governance, the payoff will not just be efficiency. It will be a financial system that finally reflects how many creditworthy Egyptians it has been missing all along.